A Deepness in the Sky

by Vernor Vinge

  Now Qiwi was getting angry, too. She grabbed one of the lower branches, hoisted herself so that she and Brughel were eye-to-eye once more. “That’s vandalism, not an explanation.” She knew that Tomas had the park monitored—and vandalism was at least the crime for Emergents that it was for Qeng Ho.

  The Podmaster was so angry that he had trouble talking. “You’re the vandals. This park was beautiful, more than I thought scum could ever make. But now you’re sabotaging it. I was in here yesterday—you’ve infected it with vermin.” He swung the metal dowel again, the blow dislodging a garbage web that was hidden in the branches. The web creatures floated off in all directions, silken glides streaming behind them. Brughel poked at the web, shaking beetle casings and dead leaves and miscellaneous detritus into a cloud around them. “See? What else are you poisoning?” He leaned close, looking down at her from above.

  For a moment Qiwi just stared, uncomprehending. He couldn’t possibly mean what he was saying. How could anyone be so ignorant? But remember, he’s a Chump. She pulled herself high enough to look down at Brughel, and shouted into his face. “It’s a zero-gee park, for God’s sake! What do you think keeps the air clean of floating crap? The garbage bugs have always been here…though maybe they’re a little overworked just now.” She hadn’t meant it quite the way it came out, but now she looked the Podmaster up and down as though she had one particularly large piece of garbage in mind.

  They were above the lower leaf canopies now. From the corner of her eye, Qiwi could see Papa. The sky was limitless blue, guarded by an occasional branch. She could feel the fake sunlight hot on the back of her head. If they played a few more rounds of one-up-one-up, they’d be banging their heads on plastic. Qiwi started laughing.

  And now Brughel was silent, just staring at her. He slapped his steel baton into his palm again and again. There were rumors about those dark stains in the metal; it was obvious what Ritser Brughel wanted people to think they were. But the guy just didn’t carry himself like a fighter. And when he swung that baton, it was as though he had never considered the possibility that there might be targets that could fight back. Just now, his only hold-on was the toe of one boot hooked between branches. Qiwi braced herself unobtrusively and smiled her most insolent smile.

  Brughel was motionless for a second. His gaze flicked to either side of her. And then without another word he pushed off, floundered for a moment, found a branch, and dived for the bottom-level hatch.

  Qiwi floated silent, the strangest feelings chasing up her body, down her arms. For a moment she couldn’t identify them. But the park…how wonderful it was with Ritser Brughel gone! She could hear the little buzzing sounds and the butterflies, where a moment before all her attention had tunneled down on the Podmaster’s anger. And now she recognized the tingling in her arms, and the racing of her heart: rage and fear.

  Qiwi Lin Lisolet had teased and enraged her share of people. It had been almost her hobby in pre-Flight. Mama said it was mind-hidden anger at the thought of being alone between the stars. Maybe. But it had also been fun. This was different.

  She turned back toward her father’s nest in the trees. And plenty of people had been angry with her over the years. Back in innocent times, Ezr Vinh used to get near apoplectic. Poor Ezr, I wish…But this today had been different. She had seen the difference in Ritser Brughel’s eyes. The man had really wanted to kill her, had teetered on the edge of trying. And probably the only thing that stopped him was the thought that Tomas would know. But if Brughel could ever get her alone, unseen by the security monitors…

  Qiwi’s hands were shaking by the time she reached Ali Lin. Papa. She wanted so much to be held, to have him soothe the shaking. Ali Lin wasn’t even looking at her. Papa had been Focused for several years now, but Qiwi could remember the times before so well. Before…Papa would have rushed out of the trees at the first sound of argument below. He would have put himself between Qiwi and Brughel, steel club or no. Now…Qiwi didn’t remember much of the last few moments except for Ritser Brughel. But there were fragments: Ali had sat unmoved among his displays and analytics. He had heard the argument, even glanced their way when the shouting became loud and close. His look had been impatient, a “don’t-distract-me” dismissal.

  Qiwi reached out a still-shaking hand to touch his shoulder. He shrugged the way you might shoo off a pesky bug. In some ways Papa still lived, but in others he seemed more dead than Mama. Tomas said that Focus could be reversed. But Tomas needed Papa and the other Focused the way they were now. Besides, Tomas had been raised an Emergent. They used Focus to make people into property. They were proud of doing so. Qiwi knew that there were plenty of Qeng Ho survivors who considered all the talk of “reversal of Focus” to be a lie. So far, not a single Focused person had been reversed. Tomas wouldn’t lie about something so important.

  And maybe if she and Papa did well enough, she could get him back the sooner. For this wasn’t a death that went on forever. She slipped into her seat beside him and resumed looking at the new diffs. The processors had given her the beginning of results while she was off trading insults with Ritser Brughel.

  Papa would be pleased.

  Nau still met with the Fleet Management Committee every Msec or so. Of course, just who attended changed substantially from Watch to Watch. Ezr Vinh was present today; it would be very interesting to see the boy’s reaction to the surprise he had planned. And Ritser Brughel was attending, so he had asked Qiwi to stay away. Nau smiled to himself. Damn, I never guessed how thoroughly she could humiliate the man.

  Nau had combined the committee with his own Emergent staff meetings and called them “Watch-manager” meetings. The point was always that whatever their old differences, they were all in this together now and survival could only come through cooperation. The meetings were not as meaningful as Nau’s private consults with Anne Reynolt or his work with Ritser and the security people. Those often occurred between the regular Watches. Still, it wasn’t a lie to say that important work was done at these per-Msec meetings. Nau flicked his hand at the agenda. “So. Our last item: Anne Reynolt’s expedition to the sun. Anne?”

  Anne didn’t smile as she corrected him. “The astrophysicists’ report, Podmaster. But first, I have a complaint. We need at least one unFocused specialist in this area. You know how hard it is to judge technical results…”

  Nau sighed. She had been after him about this in private, too. “Anne, we don’t have the resources. We have just three surviving specialists in this area.” And they were all zipheads.

  “I still need a reviewer with common sense.” She shrugged. “Very well. Per your direction, we have run two of the astrophysicists on a continuous Watch since before the Relight. Keep in mind, they’ve had five years to think about this report.” Reynolt waved at the air, and they were looking out on a modified Qeng Ho taxi. Auxiliary fuel tanks were strapped on every side, and the front was a forest of sensor gear. A silver shield-sail was propped on a rickety framework from one side of the craft. “Right before the Relight, Doctors Li and Wen flew this vehicle into low orbit around OnOff.” A second window showed the descent path, and a final orbit scarcely five hundred kilometers above the surface of the OnOff star. “By keeping the sail properly oriented, they safely flew at that altitude for more than a day.”

  Actually it was Jau Xin’s pilot-zipheads who had done the flying. Nau nodded at Xin. “That was good work, Pilot Manager.”

  Xin grinned. “Thank you, sir. Something to tell my children about.”

  Reynolt ignored the comment. She popped up multiple windows, showing low-altitude views in various spectral regimes. “We’ve had a hard time with the analysis right from the beginning.”

  They could hear the recorded voices of the two zipheads now. Li was Emergent-bred, but the other voice spoke in a Qeng Ho dialect. That must be Wen: “We’ve always known OnOff has the mass and density of a normal G star. Now we can make high-resolution maps of the interior temperatures and dens—” Dr. Li butted
in with the typical urgency of a ziphead, “—but we need more microsats…Resources be damned. We need two hundred at least, right through the time of Relighting.”

  Reynolt paused the audio. “We got them one hundred microsats.” More windows popped up, Li and Wen back at Hammerfest after the Relight, arguing and arguing. Reynolt’s reports were often like this, a barrage of pictures and tables and sound bites.

  Wen was talking again. He sounded tired. “Even in Off-state, the central densities were typical of a G star, yet there was no collapse. The surface turbulence is barely ten thousand kilometers deep. How? How? How?”

  Li: “And after Relight, the deep internal structure looks still the same.”

  “We can’t know for sure; we can’t get close.”

  “No, it looks perfectly typical now. We have models…”

  Wen’s voice changed again. He was speaking faster, in a tone of frustration, almost pain. “All this data, and we have just the same mysteries as before. I’ve spent five years now studying reaction paths, and I’m as clueless as the Dawn Age astronomers. There has to be something going on in the extended core, or else there would be a collapse.”

  The other ziphead sounded petulant. “Obviously, even in Off state the star is still radiating, but radiating something that converts to low-interaction.”

  “But what? What? And if there could be such a thing, why don’t the higher layers collapse?”

  “Cuz the conversion is at the base of the photosphere, and that is collapsed! Ryop. I’m using your own modeling software to show this!”

  “No. Post hoc nonsense, no better than ages past.”

  “But I’ve got data!”

  “So? Your adiabats are—”

  Reynolt cut the audio. “They went on like this for many days. Most of it is a private jargon, the sort of things a close-bound Focused pair often invents.”

  Nau straightened in his chair. “If they can only talk to each other, we have no access. Did you lose them?”

  “No. At least not in the usual way. Dr. Wen became so frustrated that he began to consider random externalities. In a normal person that might lead to creativity but—”

  Brughel laughed, genuinely amused. “So your astronomer laddie lost sight of the ball, eh, Reynolt?”

  Reynolt didn’t even look at Brughel. “Be silent,” she said. Nau noticed the Peddlers’ startlement at her words. Ritser was second-in-command, the obvious sadist among the rulers—and here she had abruptly put him down. I wonder when the Peddlers will figure it out. A scowl passed briefly across Brughel’s features. Then his grin broadened. He settled back in his chair and flicked an amused glance in Nau’s direction. Anne continued without missing a beat: “Wen backed off from the problem, setting it in a wider and wider context. At first, there was some relevance.”

  Wen’s voice resumed, the same rushed monotone as before. “OnOff’s galactic orbit. A clue.” The presumptive graph of OnOff’s galactic orbit—assuming no close stellar encounters—flashed in a window. Anne was dredging from the fellow’s notebooks. The plot extended back over half a billion years. It was the typical flower-petal figure of a halo-population star: Once every two hundred million years, OnOff penetrated the hidden heart of the galaxy. From there, it swung out and out till the stars spread thin and the intergalactic dark began. Tomas Nau was no astronomer, but he knew that halo-pop stars don’t have usable planetary systems, and as a result aren’t often visited. But surely that was the least of the strangeness of OnOff.

  Somehow the Qeng Ho ziphead had become totally fixated on the star’s galactic orbit. “This thing—it can’t be a star—has seen the Heart of All. Again and again and again—” Reynolt skipped through what must have been a long, trapped loop in poor Wen’s thinking. The ziphead’s voice was momentarily calmer: “Clues. There are lots of clues, really. Forget the physics; just consider the light curve. For two hundred and fifteen years out of two hundred and fifty, it radiates less perceptible energy than a brown dwarf.” The windows accompanying Wen’s thoughts flickered from idea to idea, pictures of brown dwarfs, the much more rapid oscillations that the physicists had extrapolated for OnOff’s distant past. “Things are happening that we can’t see. Relight, a light curve vaguely like a periodic Q-nova, settling over a few Msecs to a spectrum that might almost be an explainable star riding a fusion core. And then the light slowly fades back to zero…or changes into something else we cannot see. It’s not a star at all! It’s magic. A magic machine that now is broken. I’ll bet it was a fast square-wave generator once. That’s it! Magic from the heart of the galaxy, broken now so that we can’t understand it.”

  The audio abruptly ended, and Wen’s kaleidoscope of windows was fixed in mid-frenzy. “Dr. Wen has been thoroughly trapped in this cycle of ideas for ten Msec,” said Reynolt.

  Nau already knew where this was going, but he put on a concerned look anyway. “What are we left with?”

  “Dr. Li is doing okay. He was slipping into his own contrarian cycle till we separated him from Wen. But now—well, he’s fixated on the Qeng Ho system identification software. He has an enormously complex model that matches all the observations.” More pictures, Li’s theory of a new family of subatomic particles. “Dr. Li is spreading into the cognitive territory that Hunte Wen monopolized, but he’s getting very different results.”

  Li’s voice: “Yes. Yes! My model predicts stars like this must be common very near the galaxy’s hole. Very very rarely, they interact, a strongly coupled explosion. The result gets kicked high out of the core.” Of course, Li’s trajectory was identical to Wen’s after the presumed explosion. “I can fit all the parameters. We can’t see blinking stars in the dust of the core; they’re not bright and they’re very high-rate. But once in a billion years we get this asymmetrical destruction, and an ejection.” Pictures of the hypothetical explosion of OnOff’s hypothetical destroyer. Pictures of OnOff’s original solar system blown away—all except a tiny protected shadow on the far side of OnOff from the destroyer.

  Ezr Vinh leaned forward. “Lord, he’s explained just about everything.”

  “Yes,” said Nau. “Even the singleton nature of the planetary system.” He turned away from the jumble of windows, and looked at Anne. “So what do you think?”

  Reynolt shrugged. “Who knows? That’s why we need an unFocused specialist, Podmaster. Dr. Li is spreading his net wider and wider. That can be a symptom of a classic, explain-everything trap. And his particle theory is large; it may be a Shannon tautology.” She paused. Anne Reynolt was totally incapable of showmanship. Nau had arranged his questions so her bombshell came out last: “That particle theory is in his central specialty, however. And it has consequences, perhaps a faster ramscoop drive.”

  No one said anything for several seconds. The Qeng Ho had been diddling their drives for thousands of years, since before Pham Nuwen even. They had stolen insights from hundreds of civilizations. In the last thousand years, they’d made less than a one-percent improvement. “Well, well, well.” Tomas Nau knew how good it felt to gamble big…and win. Even the Peddlers were grinning like idiots. He let the good feeling pass back and forth around the room. It was very very good news, even if the payoff was at the end of the Exile. “This does make our astrophysicists a precious commodity. Can you do anything about Wen?”

  “Hunte Wen is not recoverable, I’m afraid.” She opened a window on medical imagery. To a Qeng Ho physician it might have looked like a simple brain diagnostic. To Anne Reynolt, it was a strategy map. “See, the connectivity here and here is associated with his work on OnOff; I’ve demonstrated that by detuning some of it. If we try to back him out of his fixation, we’ll wipe his work of the last five years—as well as cross connections into much of his general expertise. Remember. Focus surgery is mainly grope and peek, with resolution not much better than a millimeter.”

  “So we’d end up with a vegetable?”

  “No. If we back out and undo the Focus, he’ll have the personality and most of
the memories of before. He just won’t be much of a physicist anymore.”

  “Hmm,” said Nau, considering. So they couldn’t just deFocus the Peddler and have the outside expert Reynolt needed. And I’ll be damned if I’ll risk deFocusing the third fellow. Yet there was a very tidy solution, that still made good use of all three men. “Okay, Anne. Here is what I propose. Bring the other physicist online, but on a low duty cycle. Keep Dr. Li in the freezer while the new fellow reviews Li’s results. This won’t be as good as an unFocused review, but if you do it cleverly the results should be pretty unbiased.”

  Another shrug. Reynolt had no false modesty, but she also didn’t realize how very good she was.

  “As for Hunte Wen,” Nau continued. “He’s done his best for us, and we can’t ask for more.” Literally so, according to Anne. “I want you to deFocus him.”

  Ezr Vinh was staring, openmouthed. The other Peddlers looked almost as shocked. There was a small risk here; Hunte Wen would not be the best proof that Focus could be reversed. On the other hand, he was obviously a hardship case. Show your concern: “We’ve run Dr. Wen for more than five years straight, and I see he is already middle-aged. Use whatever medical consumables it takes to give him the best health possible.”

  It was the final agenda item, and the meeting didn’t continue for long after that. Nau watched as everyone floated out, jabbering to one another their enthusiasm about Li’s discovery and Wen’s manumission. Ezr Vinh left last, but he wasn’t talking to anyone. The boy had a glassy look about him. Yes, Mr. Vinh. Be good, and maybe someday I’ll free the one you care about.

  SIXTEEN

  Things got very quiet during the Tween Watch. Most Watches were multiples of an Msec, with overlap so people could brief the new Watch on current problems. The Tween was no secret, but Nau officially treated it as a glitch in the scheduling program, a four-day gap that appeared between Watches every so often. In fact, it was like the missing seventh floor, or that mythical magic day that comes between Oneday and Twoday.